Language Arts 8
Calamity Day 4
Checkouts
by Cynthia Rylant
**Complete the following assignment.
 Before reading the text material, on a sheet of paper, write possible meanings of the
word “checkout.”
 Read Checkouts.
 Reread Checkouts, this time annotating. (questions, thoughts, confusion, unfamiliar
vocab, etc.)
 Neatly complete the comparison graph. (This may actually need to be done on
notebook paper in order to be well done.)
 On notebook paper, respond to the 12 posed questions. Responses must be restated, in
complete sentences, supported with specific text evidence, and correct.
Checkouts
By Cynthia Rylant
Her parents had moved her to Cincinnati, to a large house with beveled glass windows and
several porches and the history her mother liked to emphasize. You’ll be lonely at first, they admitted,
but you’re so nice you’ll make friends fast. And as an impulse tore at her to lie on the floor, to hold to
their ankles and tell them she felt she was dying, to offer anything, anything at all, so they might allow
her to finish growing up in the town of her childhood, they firmed their mouths and spoke from their
chests, and they said, It’s decided.
They moved her to Cincinnati, where for a month she spent the greater part of every day in a
room full of beveled glass windows, sifting through photographs of the life she’d lived and left behind.
But it is difficult work, suffering, and in its own way a kind of art, and finally she didn’t have the
energy for it anymore, so she emerged from the beautiful house and fell in love with a bag boy at the
supermarket. Of course, this didn’t happen all at once, just like that, but in the sequence of things that’s
exactly the way it happened.
She liked to grocery shop. She loved it in the way some people have to drive long country roads,
because doing it she could think and relax and wander. Her parents wrote up the list and handed it to
her, and off she went without complaint to perform what they regarded as a great sacrifice of her time
and a sign that she was indeed a very nice girl. She had never told them how much she loved grocery
shopping, only that she was “willing” to do it. She had an intuition which told her that her parents were
not safe for sharing such strong, important facts about herself. Let them think they knew her.
Once inside the supermarket, her hands firmly around the handle of the cart, she would lapse into
a kind of reverie and wheel toward the produce. Like a Tibetan monk in solitary meditation, she
calmed to a point of deep, deep happiness; this feeling came to her, reliably, if strangely, only in the
supermarket.
Then one day the bag boy dropped her jar of mayonnaise, and that is how she fell in love.
He was nervous—first day on the job—and along had come this fascinating girl, standing in the
checkout line with the unfocused stare one often sees in young children, her face turned enough away
that he might take several full looks at her as he packed sturdy bags full of food and the goods of
modern life. She interested him because her hair was red and thick, and in it she had placed a huge
orange bow, nearly the size of a small hat. That was enough to distract him, and when finally it was her
groceries he was packing, she looked at him and smiled, and he could respond only by busting her jar
of mayonnaise on the floor, shards of glass and oozing cream decorating the area around his feet.
She loved him at exactly that moment, and if he’d known this, perhaps he wouldn’t have fallen
into the brown depression he fell into, which lasted the rest of his shift. He believed he must have
looked a fool in her eyes, and he envied the sureness of everyone around him: the cocky cashier at the
register, the grim and harried store manager, the bland butcher, and the brazen bag boys who smoked
in the warehouse on their breaks. He wanted a second chance. Another chance to be confident and say
witty things to her as he threw tin cans into her bags, persuading her to allow him to help her to her car
so he might learn just a little about her, check out the floor of the car for signs of hobbies or fetishes
and the bumpers for clues as to beliefs and loyalties.
But he busted her jar of mayonnaise, and nothing else worked out for the rest of the day.
Strange, how attractive clumsiness can be. She left the supermarket with stars in her eyes, for she
had loved the way his long, nervous fingers moved from the conveyor belt to the bags, how deftly
(until the mayonnaise) they had picked up her items and placed them into her bags. She had loved the
way the hair kept falling into his eyes as he leaned over to grab a box or a tin. And the tattered brown
shoes he wore with no socks. And the left side of his collar turned in rather than out.
The bag boy seemed a wonderful contrast to the perfectly beautiful house she had been forced to
accept as her home, to the history she hated, to the loneliness she had become used to, and she couldn’t
wait to come back for more of his awkwardness and dishevelment.
Incredibly, it was another four weeks before they saw each other again. As fate would have it, her
visits to the supermarket never coincided with his schedule to bag. Each time she went to the store, her
eyes scanned the checkouts at once, her heart in her mouth. And each hour he worked, the bag boy
kept one eye on the door, watching for the red-haired girl with the big orange bow.
Yet in their disappointment these weeks, there was a kind of ecstasy. It is reason enough to be
alive, the hope you may see again some face which has meant something to you. The anticipation of
meeting the bag boy eased the girl’s painful transition into her new and jarring life in Cincinnati. It
provided for her an anchor amid all that was impersonal and unfamiliar, and she spent less time on
thoughts of what she had left behind as she concentrated on what might lie ahead. And for the boy, the
long often tedious hours at the supermarket, which provided no challenge other than that of showing
up the following workday . . . these hours became possibilities of mystery and romance for him as he
watched the electric doors for the girl in the orange bow.
And when finally they did meet up again, neither offered a clue to the other that he, or she, had
been the object of obsessive thought for weeks. She spotted him as soon as she came into the store, but
she kept her eyes strictly in front of her as she pulled out a cart and wheeled it toward the produce. And
he, too, knew the instant she came through the door—though the orange bow was gone, replaced by a
small but bright yellow flower
instead—and he never once turned his head in her direction but watched her from the corner of his
vision as he tried to swallow back the fear in his throat.
It is odd how we sometimes deny ourselves the very pleasure we have longed for and which is
finally within our reach. For some perverse reason she would not have been able to articulate, the girl
did not bring her cart up to the bag boy’s checkout when her shopping was done. And the bag boy let
her leave the store, pretending no notice of her.
This is often the way of children, when they truly want a thing, to pretend that they don’t. And
then they grow angry when no one tries harder to give them this thing they so casually rejected, and
they soon find themselves in a rage simply because they cannot say yes when they mean yes. Humans
are very complicated. (And perhaps cats, who have been known to react in the same way, though the
resulting rage can only be guessed at.)
The girl hated herself for not checking out at the boy’s line, and the boy hated himself for not
catching her eye and saying hello, and they most sincerely hated each other without having every
exchanged even two minutes of conversation.
Eventually—in fact, within the week—a kind and intelligent boy who lived very near her
beautiful house asked the girl to a movie, and she gave up her fancy for the bag boy at the supermarket.
And the bag boy himself grew so bored with his job that he made a desperate search for something
better and ended up in a bookstore where scores of fascinating girls lingered like honeybees about a
hive. Some months later the bag boy and the girl with the orange bow again crossed paths, standing in
line with their dates at a movie theater, and, glancing toward the other, each smiled slightly, then
looked away, as strangers on public buses often do when one is moving off the bus and the other is
moving on.
Character
Elements
Physical
description
Character
motivations
(Why does each
character DO
what she/he
does?)
Character traits
(adjectives)
Actions
(What does the
character DO?)
How does each
feel about her or
his action?
The Girl
The Boy
Similarities &
Differences
Complete the following questions on notebook paper. Responses MUST BE
restated, in complete sentences, and correct. Responses must also be
supported with specific story evidence.
1. The girl offers to go to the supermarket. Use evidence from the text to explain what motivated her to
volunteer.
2. What evidence shows the reason the girl is interested in the boy?
3. How does the bag boy help the girl even though he never speaks to her? Support your answer with evidence.
4. What kind of person is the boy? How do you know?
5. How does the boy use his attraction to the girl as an escape from his tedious job?
6. Give evidence about the girl’s perception regarding her parents’ feeling towards her. Do you agree or disagree
with her perception? Use evidence from the text to support your stance.
7. When does she notice the bag boy and what are her feelings towards him? Provide 2 pieces of evidence to
support your response.
8. The author states, “She left the supermarket with stars in her eyes…” What inference can you make about the
meaning of “stars in her eyes?”
9. How have the girl’s feelings for the boy changed how she feels about Cincinnati? How?
10. Analyze how the boy and girl feel about their situations and each other a month later.
11. Explain why the author chose “Checkouts” rather than “Checkout”.
12. Think about why the author didn’t name the main character. How would knowing the name of the main
character affect the story?